California Highway Patrol officers believe two 17-year-old Sherman Oaks boys arrested early Wednesday while allegedly tagging walls on the San Diego Freeway near Sepulveda Boulevard may also be responsible for thousands of dollars of other graffiti damage in the area. Officers spotted the boys about 2:30 a.m. Wednesday spray-painting sound walls on the freeway, according to CHP spokesman Dwight McDonald.

The final straw for Cliff Reston came the day his neighbor's front-yard wall became the latest target of a tagger's illegible scrawl. "It was a very pretty stone wall and somebody marked it up," Reston said of the 1992 incident near his Sherman Oaks home. "We used steel brushes to clean it up but I thought, 'This is too much.'

The FBI is investigating the recent distribution of anti-Semitic leaflets in various communities in Southern California and the July 31 vandalism of a West Hills synagogue, officials said Monday. A Los Angeles Police Department detective, meanwhile, said a second synagogue in the San Fernando Valley--Temple Ahavat Shalom in Northridge--also was vandalized. The vandalism apparently occurred on the same night as the incident at Temple Solael in West Hills, Los Angeles Det. Ed Heissel said.

Less than a week after Agoura residents reported finding anti-Semitic leaflets labeled with an Internet address in their mailboxes, a West Hills synagogue was vandalized with graffiti that included the same Web address, that of a white supremacy group. The graffiti were discovered Friday morning on an exterior wall at Temple Solael on Valley Circle Boulevard, said Bob Howe, a detective supervisor at the West Valley division of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Less than a week after Agoura residents reported finding anti-Semitic leaflets labeled with an Internet address in their mailboxes, a West Hills synagogue was vandalized with graffiti that included the same Web address of a white supremacy group. The graffiti was discovered Friday morning on an exterior wall at Temple Solael on Valley Circle Boulevard, said Bob Howe, a detective supervisor with the West Valley Division of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Students and teachers returning Monday to Pinewood Avenue School discovered huge red swastikas and other racist graffiti spray-painted on new murals, playground equipment and buildings, school officials said. Their discovery came a week after hate messages were scrawled at another Los Angeles Unified School District campus in the San Fernando Valley. Officials said there was no apparent connection between the two cases.

The vans roll out each morning at 7, seven days a week, their crews of court-referred laborers on a mission: to erase the graffiti on public and private property all through the San Fernando Valley. For these minor criminals clad in orange vests and ordered to perform community service, it's a daily grind where supply never seems to exceed demand.

About 200 birds that live in the murky trash-strewn tidal zone called the Dominguez Channel were taken to a rescue center after an act of vandalism released thousands of gallons of industrial chemicals into a storm drain, officials said. Investigators suspect that someone broke into a chemical transport company yard in unincorporated county territory near Carson on Saturday night and opened the valves on four tanker trucks, California Department of Fish and Game officials said.

A Granada Hills man was charged Thursday with two dozen criminal counts on suspicion of painting swastikas at an apartment complex with mostly Jewish tenants, authorities said. Claudio Marcelo Petrello, 31, was arrested about 2:30 a.m. when he entered the Sherman Oaks complex to paint more of the symbols, said Det. Harvey Surrena of the Los Angeles Police Department's Van Nuys station.

It is considered an oasis amid the urban sprawl of South-Central Los Angeles: The Garden Project, an acre of fruit trees, vegetables, climbing roses and a greenhouse at 79th Street and Towne Avenue. Two weeks ago, the greenhouse was vandalized, sending a wave of anger throughout the neighborhood where senior citizens and high school students worked side by side planting a community garden.